FILM; At Cannes, Blueberry Nights and Romanian Days

By A.O. SCOTT

Published: May 18, 2007

As a first course the 60th Cannes Film Festival served its audiences dessert.

Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director who was president of the jury at the 2006 festival, opened this year's event with ''My Blueberry Nights,'' a romantic confection that begins with a lingering shot of vanilla ice cream melting into the gooey filling of a blueberry pie. The film, Mr. Wong's first English-language feature, takes place in a postcard America of diners and red neon signs, a land of heartbreak and second chances where folks play poker and drink whiskey and subsist on cheeseburgers, pork chops and, in at least one case, quite a bit of that pie.

The pie eater is Norah Jones, the singer and songwriter, who makes her screen debut as Elizabeth, a New Yorker on the rebound from a long relationship with an unfaithful, unseen and unnamed boyfriend. She takes refuge in a homey restaurant managed by Jeremy (Jude Law), where there is always a lot of blueberry pie left over at closing time.

After they strike up a late-night, pastry-fueled friendship, sealed with a lovely, drowsy screen kiss, Elizabeth takes off on a journey that leads her from Memphis to Nevada, through a series of waitress jobs, slightly altered identities (she's Lizzie in one place, Beth in another) and encounters with other lonely souls. These include an alcoholic policeman (David Strathairn), his estranged wife (Rachel Weisz) and a gambler (Natalie Portman) who seems to talk a better game than she plays.

Over the years Mr. Wong has acquired a passionate following -- one that occasionally manifests cultlike tendencies -- for his sensual visual style and oblique narratives of erotic longing. ''My Blueberry Nights'' may strike his devotees, and skeptics as well, as both a notable departure and a variation on his characteristic themes. He is still interested in the mysterious nature of desire and the effects of time and distance upon it. But the setting, the language and the conventions of English-language screen acting give this movie, for better or worse, a decided air of novelty.

Mr. Wong's other recent films, like ''In the Mood For Love'' and ''2046'' (both shown at previous festivals here) unfold mainly in the narrow hallways and cramped rooms of hotels and apartment buildings in crowded Asian cities, where the men dress in dark suits and the women wear flower-printed cheongsams.

Those movies are dense with color and shadow. In ''My Blueberry Nights,'' shot in CinemaScope by Darius Khondji, the colors are still rich and smoky, but the wider format gives the compositions a looser, more open feeling. And the characters, contemporary Americans (and one British expatriate), are correspondingly relaxed, even in their moments of distress. Whereas their Asian counterparts in other Wong Kar-wai movies -- Gong Li, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung -- show emotion through masks of mystery and reserve, Ms. Jones and her co-stars invite and promise easy empathy.

Whether they entirely earn it is another question, one likely to be batted around as ''My Blueberry Nights'' continues on its journey to screens around the world. (It will be released in the United States by the Weinstein Company.) One of the more annoying tics of the kibitzers at Cannes (including this correspondent) is the habit of rendering authoritative, often hyperbolic snap judgments before the final credits are done. Thus, while the soundtrack music from ''My Blueberry Nights,'' which includes American institutions like Otis Redding, Ruth Brown and Ry Cooder, was still echoing in the Palais des Festivals, you could hear dyspeptic grumbling about Mr. Wong's American venture, along with a certain amount of defensive praise.

There will be plenty of time to sort it out. My initial impression is of a sweet, insubstantial movie that might have been more exciting -- more meaningful -- to make than it is to see. At the press conference after the morning screening, though, not everyone involved in making the film had seen it yet. Ms. Jones said she had watched the trailer, part of which Mr. Law had also glimpsed before being summoned to meet the assembled journalists. Mr. Wong, not known for rushing his films to completion, noted that post-production work had finished only a few days before.

As is customary the questions were respectful, and as is also customary the response of the audience at the gala red carpet screening on Wednesday night was loud and appreciative. Decked out in tuxedos and evening gowns, members of that audience were in the mood for delectation rather than debate. And the mood lingered as some of them waited (along with less decoratively attired camp followers) on a narrow sidewalk near the Palais des Festivals, where they shoved their way onto buses marked ''Party.''

The party -- an opening night ritual that only the very wisest among us have learned to avoid -- was in a hangarlike structure called La Palestra some distance from the Croisette, the main drag. It housed a kind of Eurotrash version of Mr. Wong's version of Americana.

There was the usual throb of dance music, a rotating circular dance floor and huge video monitors showing rather unflattering images of the party itself. Airstream trailers had been made over into diners and V.I.P. lounges, and guests were served cheeseburgers and milkshakes as well as whiskey and Champagne. There were jars of candy on the tables outside, and on one of the bars in La Palestra sat an untouched blueberry pie (though it might have been a tart) waiting for Ms. Jones or some other lovelorn late-night straggler to take the first slice.

But the menu and the mood at this festival changes rapidly. Mr. Wong's gentle fantasy of America was followed by Cristian Mungiu's harshly realistic look at Romania in the last years of the Ceausescu dictatorship in ''4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.'' Since 2005, when Cannes audiences were stunned by Cristi Puiu's ''Death of Mr. Lazarescu'' in the sidebar program, Un Certain Regard, Cannes has been host to a series of tough, strong, darkly comical Romanian films, as directors in that country, assisted by a remarkable pool of native acting talent, confront the difficulties of the present and the brutalities of the past.

Taking place in a single day, ''4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days'' tells the story of two college roommates, one of whom is seeking an illegal abortion. At once unsparing and generous, unfolding in the long, tense takes that seem to be typical of the new Romanian cinema, the film exposes the decay of human decency under Communism. At its heart is a breathtakingly poised lead performance by Anamaria Marinca as Otilla, a young woman whose decision to help an unreliable friend (Laura Vasiliu) in need has fateful consequences.

And so within 24 hours there was Cannes in a nutshell: the giddy anticipation of ''My Blueberry Nights'' followed by the satisfying sense of discovery supplied by ''4 Months''; a glamorous bonbon chased by an astringent draught of unhappiness. And thousands of movie lovers hungry for more.